COMMENTARY

ARTICLES

Observations on the Use of Manual Signs and Gestures in the Communicative
Interactions between Native Americans and Spanish Explorers of North America:
The Accounts of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

BOOK REVIEW

Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Christopher Krentz

H-Dirksen L. Bauman

ABSTRACTS

Research Ethics in Sign Language
Communities

Codes of ethics exist for most professional associations whose members do
research on, for, or with sign language communities. However, these ethical
codes are silent regarding the need to frame research ethics from a cultural
standpoint, an issue of particular salience for sign language communities.
Scholars who write from the perspective of feminists, indigenous peoples, and
human rights advocates have commonly expressed dissatisfaction with their lack
of representation in conversations about research ethics. Members of sign
language communities and their advocates can learn from others who share in this
struggle and contribute much to this topic. We propose the development of sign
language communities’ terms of reference (SLCTR) as a means to research by, for,
and with sign language communities.

Observations on the Use of Manual Signs
and Gestures in the Communicative Interactions between Native Americans and
Spanish Explorers of North America: The Accounts of Bernal Díaz del Castillo
and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

The accounts of two men who participated in several Spanish-led expeditions to
the New World in the early 1500s document the frequent use of manual signs and
gestures in the initial interactions between European explorers and the
indigenous peoples of North America. Bernal Díaz del Castillo described the
events that occurred during three expeditions to lands that are part of
present-day Mexico. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca recounted the incidents that took
place during his trek across much of the North American continent. Their reports
reveal that both the European explorers and the indigenous peoples relied on
manual signs and gestures to help overcome spoken-language communication
barriers. They also show that manual signing was already being widely used by
the native peoples of North America at the time of their first contacts with
European explorers.

Vincent, a hearing child of deaf parents who was fluent in ASL by the time of
his first exposure to a spoken language (English) at about age 3, needed only a
few months to learn the distinction between English first person pronouns and
pronouns referring to other grammatical persons, but it was several years before
he learned all the other distinctions made by English pronouns: second vs. third
person, singular vs. plural, near vs. far from the speaker (e.g., this vs.
that), objects vs. persons (it vs. he), objects vs. places
(that vs. there), objects vs. directions (thatone vs.
thatway), and gender (he vs. she). This provides some
support for the now widely accepted view proposed by Meier (1990) that ASL
distinguishes only two grammatical persons: first and other, with the
distinctions just listed expressed mostly by pointing, thus on transparent,
analog principles quite unlike the opaque, discrete system used for pronouns in
English. Nonetheless, it is argued in this article that the view of ASL as
having only a two-person pronominal system is only an approximation to the
reality of its pronouns, which intertwine iconic and arbitrary means of
expression throughout.

In sign language studies, it is generally assumed that a sign can be divided
into several phases in time (preparation, stroke, and retraction) and that the
stroke contains all of the necessary information. However, this has not been
tested empirically.

In order to learn where the information truly resides, we present an experiment
that investigates the distribution of information in a sign. Signers were shown
isolated fragments of Dutch Sign Language signs (citation form) and were then
asked to identify the sign. The results show that the stroke alone performs as
well as the entire sign. However, the preparation, together with the transition
from preparation to stroke, produces equally good recognition, thereby
suggesting that most of a sign’s information is available early. Surprisingly,
in many cases preparation alone and retraction alone also produce quite good
recognition (66 percent and 60 percent, respectively). The recognition pattern
across signs gives an indication of signers’ recognition strategy.